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九、甘地的和平主义

    Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. (46)Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definite technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, (47)the method Gandhi proposed and practiced, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of nonviolent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujuruti, it seems the word means “firmness in the truth.” (48)In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-1918. Even after he had completely renounced violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. Since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not and, (49)indeed, he did not take the fruitless and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer is: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated?”(50)I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and his answer was on record in Mr. Louis Fisher’s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fisher, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”

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